Joel Dunham
Senior Software Engineer at Latacora
Surrey, British Columbia, Canada
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJoel Dunham is a Senior Software Engineer with 13 years of experience building backend and distributed business systems for startups, research institutions, and open-source projects. He specializes in Clojure and Python, functional programming, and designing robust integrations and APIs—recently delivering billing and customer-experience integrations at CircleCI and joining Splash as a senior engineer. Joel pairs pragmatic engineering with rigorous research instincts from a Ph.D. in Linguistics (UBC), which has informed his work on NLP, language-data platforms and deployable academic tooling like Dative/OLD. He has a track record of improving system performance and testability—reducing processing time by up to 80% on archival pipelines and creating generative and Gherkin-based test suites adopted across teams. Based in Surrey, BC, he bridges academic rigor and production-grade engineering, often turning specification-as-data into reproducible, well-documented services.
13 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Linguistics, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Linguistics at The University of British ColumbiaComputational Linguistics Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics Natural Language Processing at Summer Institute, Linguistic Society of America
Spanish, Italian, French, blackfoot
Stackoverflow
43reputation
2kreached
1answer
1question
Github Skills (86)
tuple10
python10
phonetics10
django10
languagetool10
abaqus10
philosophy10
kubernetes10
digital-preservation10
storage10
gherkin10
collections10
linguistics10
behave10
selenium10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
dativebase/old
Nov 2012 - Aug 2020
The Online Linguistic Database (OLD): software for linguistic fieldwork.
Contributions:236 commits, 3 PRs, 60 pushes in 7 years 10 months
database
dativebase/senex
Apr 2016 - Jan 2019
Web-based administrative tool for OLDs
Contributions:2 PRs, 37 pushes, 2 branches in 2 years 9 months
web-basedadministrative
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